Confessions

"A book as unique as its subject matter - messy, incomplete, at times unreliable, yet as haunting and alluring as memories themselves." -- Justin Stephani - Electric Literature "This elegy for a lost Beirut, past and future, this novel was carrying me to a place I had never been before." -- Alan Cheuse - NPR "A slim, powerful volume, now in deft translation by Kareem James Abu-Zeid ... [Jaber] is a major force in Arabic literature." -- M. Lynx-Qualey - The Chicago Tribune "Clever and illuminating." -- Malcolm Forbes - The National "Jaber shares a delight in stories that defy conventional ideas about identity and the relations between East and West." -- The New York Review of Books "Jaber is interested in what it means to live in and with fear, not for one season but for a whole generation, two generations, three. He's interested in the bones of Beirut, a city that has had to rebuild itself repeatedly after being razed in war in 140 B.C., then devastated by the earthquake of 551, then again during the civil war, a city whose name derives from the Canaanite be'erot - "wells" - the water table that still sustains it. He's interested in what lies beneath, what nourishes us without our knowing." -- Parul Sehgal - The New York Times Book Review "[An] unflinching thriller about trauma and forgiveness, set in the chaos of the Lebanese Civil War." -- Jeva Lange - The Week "Abu-Zeid has made Rabee Jaber's Beirut part of our imaginary landscape and added him to our constellation of fiction writers." -- Erik Noonan - World Literature Today